| Showdown
in Desire
The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans
Orissa Arend
Foreword by Charles E. Jones
Introduction by Curtis J. Austin
A look back at a powerful moment
in New Orleans’s history
“An admirably researched manuscript that illuminates
an important yet overlooked chapter of African American history
in New Orleans.”
—Lance Hill, author of The Deacons for Defense:
Armed Resistance and
the Civil Rights Movement
“Orissa Arend has done her homework . . . she has managed
to help disseminate and preserve the legacy of the Black Panther
party, more specifically, the New Orleans chapter.”
—Robert H. King, a.k.a Robert King Wilkerson, freed
member of the Angola 3 and author of From the Bottom of
the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary
King
“Orissa
Arend has forced us to see these self-defense militants from
every point of view imaginable. Moving, informative, and in
places side-splittingly funny, Showdown in Desire
restores to Technicolor memory a chapter of civil rights history
too often neglected. The book deserves a wide audience.”
—Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party
in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with
the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs,
and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police
in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with
Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member
of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman;
Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident;
Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest;
William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa
Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas,
desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to
capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and
revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.
Orissa Arend
is a mediator, freelance journalist, and psychotherapist in
private practice in New Orleans. She has written for the Louisiana
Weekly, the New Orleans Tribune, and the Times-Picayune.
Charles E. Jones
is associate professor and founding chair of the Department
of African-American Studies at Georgia State University. He
is the editor of Black Panther Party Reconsidered.
Curtis J. Austin
is associate professor of history and director of the Center
for Black Studies at the University of Southern Mississippi.
He is the author of Up Against
the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black
Panther Party.
April
6 x 9, 304 pages, 31 photographs, index
$29.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-896-7 | 1-55728-896-8
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